Winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2013.
Stretching across three decades, with an interlude in Mao's China, it portrays a city in collision with itself. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012.
Sir Peter Stothard, Chair of Man Booker Prize 2012 judging panel, on Narcopolis...
'Narcopolis is by the Indian poet Jeet Thayil. This was a year of many fine novels on the mystery of the modern city. ‘Bombay’ is the first and last word of this first novel, an urban history written by a former drug addict through the changing composition of opiates and the changing character of their users. Poetry is not often a stepping stone to the novel.
But we much admired his perfumed prose from the drug-dens and back streets of India's most concentrated conurbation, its mix of the domestic and exotic, the nearly infinite and the nastily defined.'
Jeet Thayil, author of NARCOPOLIS (Faber), has won the third DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2013. Worth US$50,000 Jeet is the first Indian author to carry off the award.
FROM ARTICLE IN GUARDIAN 26TH NOV 2012. AUTHOR FAVOURITES OF 2012:
Edna O'Brien - 'In sumptuous language, Jeet Thayil's Narcopolis (Faber) depicts the hallucinogenic sensibilities of those trapped in the opium rooms of Mumbai and by extension, the city itself, with its assortment of broken and stranded people, doomed to live in the shadows.'
Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid's opium room a young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame as men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. In Shuklaji Street they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. But then whispers build of a new terror, something that shifts the tenuous balance of survival for the city's nameless, invisible poor. A rich, hallucinatory dream of a novel, Narcopolis captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets and gangsters, it is a lyrical and unforgettable journey into a sprawling underworld. The reader is Robertson Dean.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
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Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid's opium room a young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame as men sprawl and mutter in the gloom.
Narcopolis features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, eBooks of the Month, General Fiction, Fiction, Recommendations
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Narcopolis was written by Jeet Thayil and published by Faber & Faber
